At the morgue in Delhi’s Maulana Azad hospital, a woman in her 30s leaned over a covered body. “Maa... Kriti,” she whispered hoarsely, voice trembling as she pointed to tattoos on the charred forearm that she recognised as her husband’s.
Amar Kataria, a Chandni Chowk businessman, had been in his car near the Red Fort metro station on the evening of November 10. At about 6:52pm, a sudden flash and a deafening boom tore through the air, instantly taking Kataria from his family. A blazing inferno raged as nearby vehicles caught fire. Human bodies and body parts lay strewn all around. “He loved tattoos,” said Mohan Sharma, a relative of Kataria. Sharma confirmed to THE WEEK that they identified Kataria based on his tattoos—maa and Kriti (daughter). The doting father’s phone, recovered from the debris, still showed his last call: “Kriti Home”.
At last count, 13 people have lost their lives in the explosion, while dozens were injured. Among the dead were Ashok Kumar Singh, a 34-year-old DTC bus conductor; Nouman Ansari, a 29-year-old cosmetics trader from Jhinjhana in Uttar Pradesh’s Shamli district, and Pankaj Sahni, a 22-year-old cab driver from Bihar’s Samastipur—ordinary people going about their daily lives.
“Different place, same loss,” said Ashok Randhawa, president of the Sarojini Nagar Market Traders’ Association and a survivor of the 2005 Delhi serial blasts.
Randhawa was among the first to reach the LNJP Hospital and the Maulana Azad Medical College. “Every time there’s a blast, I rush to the hospitals,” he told THE WEEK. “It’s not duty, it’s memory.... After 20 years, the same pattern repeats.”
A series of connected events preceded the November 9 blast.
From October 19 onwards, police in Jammu and Kashmir began investigating the sudden appearance of posters, purportedly put up by Jaish-e-Mohammad, vowing vengeance on security forces. These posters appeared in Bunpora, Nowgam and Srinagar.
Questioning of three suspected JeM overground workers led to a maulvi in Shopian, Irfan Ahamed, who revealed an intricate network spanning Kashmir, Faridabad and Mewat in Haryana, Delhi and Saharanpur in Uttar Pradesh.
Investigations uncovered a “white-collar terror ecosystem” involving radicalised professionals and students in contact with foreign handlers operating from Pakistan and other countries.
Significantly, before the Delhi blast, J&K Police had issued an official statement announcing the unearthing of an “inter-state” and “transnational” terror module. The release stated: “The group has been using encrypted channels for indoctrination, coordination, fund movement and logistics. Funds were raised through professional and academic networks, under the guise of social/charitable causes.”
Soon, several people including the now infamous doctors—Dr Muzammil Ahmad Ganaie from Faridabad (originally from Pulwama), Dr Adeel Ahmad Rather from Saharanpur (originally from Qazigund) and Dr Shaheen Sayeed from Lucknow—were arrested.
The accused are believed to have links with JeM and the Al Qaeda-affiliated Ansar Ghazwat-ul-Hind, both based in Pakistan, though recent investigations suggest connections with handlers in Afghanistan and Turkey. These outfits have declared the “liberation” of Kashmir as their central goal in waging war against India.
What has alarmed security agencies is the module’s extensive activity so close to the national capital.
Several aspects stand out.
One, Kashmir-centric terror outfits may be shifting focus from hit-and-run guerrilla operations in J&K to targeting urban centres elsewhere.
In a couple of years leading up to 2023, “hybrid” terrorists in J&K targeted soft civilian and migrant worker populations to derail signs of normalcy in the Union Territory. As security forces tightened their grip, militants altered tactics in 2023—luring security personnel into ambush zones in the hills and forests, where they could engage with volleys of heavy gunfire from vantage positions, provisioned with ample supplies of weapons, ammunition and food. As with jungle warfare techniques, the vantage point was selected to also ensure a secure exit route after inflicting the maximum possible damage. As a result, such encounters often stretched on but ultimately ended with the terrorists being neutralised.
Now, evidence suggests a new shift: sleeper cells are being activated to strike beyond Kashmir. For this, terror elements from the valley are said to be establishing contact with the remnants of dormant fundamentalist groups in other parts of India.
Two, attacks in major cities outside Kashmir attract far greater international attention.
On October 31, National Security Adviser Ajit Doval, speaking at the Sardar Patel Memorial Lecture in Delhi, had said that terrorism had been effectively countered and that the last major attack in India’s hinterland took place in 2013. “Except for Jammu and Kashmir, which had been a theatre of a proxy war or a covert warfare for Pakistan, which is a different ballgame, the whole country has remained secure from terrorist attacks,” he noted. The November 10 blast may well have been intended to challenge that assertion.
Three, the perception of a terrorist as uneducated or economically deprived no longer holds true. As the arrests of the doctors show, the new-age militant may be educated, articulate and well-heeled with a degree of sophistication that may not typically be associated with an ultra orthodox Islamist radical—making detection far more difficult for security agencies.
Though the busting of the terror module may have prevented more ‘spectacular’ attacks, it remains alarming that the group managed to stockpile around 2,900kg of ammonium nitrate, along with detonators, timers, batteries and sophisticated firearms right under the nose of the security forces.
A dilemma for New Delhi is to whether publicly name Pakistan as the key patron of the module and the Delhi blast. Doing so would raise pressure to respond, especially since Operation Sindoor—after the April 22 Pahalgam terror attack—had already brought India and Pakistan to the brink of an all-out war.
Two days after the Delhi blast, in Bhutan’s Thimphu, Prime Minister Narendra Modi vowed retribution: “Our agencies will get to the bottom of this conspiracy, and the conspirators will not be spared... all those responsible will be brought to justice.”
That same day, a suicide bomber struck a district court in Islamabad, killing 12. Pakistan’s prime minister, Shehbaz Sharif, promptly blamed India, while also terming the Delhi blast “mysterious”.
As narratives and counter-narratives continue and probe into the Red Fort explosion unfolds, many questions remain.
Was the November 10 blast intentional or accidental? Is there a broader strategy driving these networks? What could be the impact on regional security?
With the network and its tentacles unravelling by the day, one thing grows clearer: the danger may no longer be coming from across the border alone. It may already be within—lurking in more sleeper cells waiting for the next opportunity to strike.